Nokia pushes for NFC ecosystem in Singapore

Booking a taxi can now be as easy as tapping your smartphone on a signboard.

Through near field communication (NFC) technology, information stored on simple posters can be transmitted to an electronic device like your smartphone and used in a wide variety of scenarios, including the one above.

Determined to give NFC a push, Nokia – which manufactures a number of NFC-enabled phones – has partnered with several local technology and businesses to get the word out, including taxi operator ComfortDelGro.

From 8 October, taxi commuters can tap their NFC-enabled phone at any of 400 locations to initiate a taxi booking. An SMS confirmation of the booking will then be sent to the user’s mobile phone.

In partnership with the National Heritage Board (NHB), about 25 landmarks in Singapore’s cultural districts will also be augmented with NFC tags, allowing visitors to learn more about the history of different precincts like the Bras Basah and Bugis areas.

SMRT is also jumping on to the bandwagon and will roll out NFC tags across its MRT stations for commuters to interact with. These tags will contain news and merchant offers.

This collective effort will be centered on the Nokia’s newly-launched Singapore NFC Hub, a website which provides education and other resources for businesses interested in utilising NFC for creating custom marketing or promotional campaigns.

Through the website, businesses can order NFC tags and posters. The NFC hub will also enables businesses to track their campaigns’ performance.

Although Nokia is mainly responsible for this push, NFC chips can be embedded into all smartphones and other types of devices, regardless of platform. The new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, for one, is NFC-compliant.

The NFC hub is thus potentially beneficial to all device manufacturers, as long as they include an embedded NFC chip in their devices.

It's too early to tell if Nokia’s attempts to push NFC will reap any rewards, as it remains to be seen whether organisations will embrace NFC. Above all, the relative lack of NFC-devices on the market will hamper the technology’s reception.